Customers are typically asked to assess the quality or effectiveness of a product or service through customer surveys, Web-based feedback forms or the like. Typically, customers are asked to rate a product or service using a scale, such as from zero to five. The average rating is usually determined by summing the ratings and dividing the sum by the total number of evaluators who rated the product or service. Determining the average in this manner can mislead customers as to the quality of the product or service, however, especially when the rating distribution is bimodal, or has a large number of low ratings and a large number of high ratings. For example, a product that receives two ‘1’ ratings and two ‘5’ ratings (on a scale from one to five) has the same average as a product that receives four ‘3’ ratings.
In particular, if a product or service is offered by multiple vendors, consumers may rate the product or service very differently based on the vendor who provides the product or service. As such, it would be helpful to a potential consumer of a good or service if useful information were available regarding the effect of a vendor on consumer ratings. For example, a seller of printing devices may contract with several vendors to provide maintenance services on those devices. While the services may be identical, consumer satisfaction with the service may vary widely by vendor. If a method or system were available to assess consumer satisfaction of a service by vendor and compare the data of one vendor to others, the print device supplier could address issues with underperforming maintenance service vendors and thus improve customer satisfaction.
A broker may offer production print services including printing, binding, envelope insertions, three-hole drilling, etc. on behalf of clients. Production print services are contracted through a number of vendors, Clients may rate the performance of vendors according to a number of criteria including product quality, ability to satisfy service level agreements, and value. A broker would like to offer clients the best possible service and value by assessing vendor ratings and organize vendors into tiers or clusters of ones with similar ratings distributions.
Methods and systems for clustering and displaying product and service ratings by rating distribution would be desirable.